Triumph of the Nomads, A History of Aboriginal Australia

Abstract

This is a review of Geoffrey Blainey's Triumph of the Nomads, a History of Aboriginal Australia (1976). Disciplines Anthropology | Social and Behavioral Sciences This review is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/anthro_papers/64 218 ANTHROPOLOGICAL QUARTERLY tion in a Bolivian town, despite truly radical changes in social structure. Using simple diagrams to illustrate his analyses, Heath describes the changes in patronclient networks for curing, land, justice, public works, and marketing. Robert Shirley, in the context of greater economic development, traces the process and patterning of patronage in the large system of cooperatives in Sao Paulo State. Esther Hermitte, an Argentine investigator, breaks new relating a network of women in patron-client relationship. They are the weavers and local marketers of vicuiTa and Ilama ponchos, the only cash products in an.otherwise subsistence farming valley on the eastern slopes of the Andes. Only women weave, and they guard the privileges connected with this occupation, supporting the definition of male weavers as homosexual. Males without land or other occupation, then, generally do nothing or take migratory work outside the region, reinforcing the womens' hold on the only local industry. Breaking even newer ground, Nancie Gonzalez enters the realm of patron-client relations at the international level. She summarizes the economic and political interdependence of the Dominican Republic (cl ent) and the United States (patron) over the past hundred years. Basically the relati n involves a powerful oligarchy, the elite in many areas of national life in the Republic, and its position in the disbursement of valuable resources-notably, foreign aid. Gonzalez' paper should be read-it may inspire more research into the workings of personalized-formal relations among those doing business at the international level. To date, the expertise of the heads of even the largest U.S. corporations does not extend to competently handling the grey areas, the interstices in world markets. Personalized dealings, often with a patroncli nt component, are frequently identified in the popular press with graft, corruption, and bribery. However, it seems that dishonesty, as such, is possible in any human system, rationally formalized or not. Perhaps for the forseeable future Americans will need to learn how to work ethically within patron-client-like systems. Anthropologists can surely make a key contribution, toward this end, for which Structure and Process in Latin America can serve as a